The Sunday Papers

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As I return from Jim’s 30th, just in time to actually get my bags together to go to San Diego Comic Con next week – and if you’re there, do pop to say hello at the Image booth where I’ll be most of the time – and… well, do the Sunday Papers, of course. What’s the Sunday Papers? Well, it’s our regular list of reading for a Sunday Afternoon, where I compile smart pieces of commentary which caught my eye this week while trying to avoid linking to two obliquely videogame-related songs.

I don’t follow the Gold Farmer market, but this report interested me. In obvious relations to the law of supply and demand, the recent mass-banning by Blizzard has caused the market Gold Price to rocket. Lots of analysis here.

10 Comments

Excellent. I was hoping for something a bit more opinionated, but it’ll do. Leigh’s article had more food for thought though it provided almost as few answers.

Also, speaking of dialogue systems in RPG’s, Vince (remember him?) had a pretty decent article about that over at Iron Tower’s forums. Can’t say I see the great promise in going back to keywords again, but maybe he’s going to prove me wrong some day.

Personally I think the answer is in better text parsers. At some point AI is bound to get good enough that you can use it to understand language and generate responses on the fly. It’ll probably be a decade or two though, sadly.

Depictions of women (and male for that matter, but I think it’s still pertienent to focus on representations of women) in media need to be challenged when they repeat these stereotypes. Idealising and repeating these stereotypes helps no one, and just serves to perpetuate unltimately discriminatory (or, at least, exclusionary) norms.

That being said, I quite like Soul Calibur, it’s one of my favourite beat ’em ups, and, though it makes me uncomfortable, it’s not that I don’t think Ivy and her ilk shouldn’t look like that – that would be censorship, which also helps no one. Ideally, what I’d like to see are people generating (more) alternatives (strong lead characters in games which don’t rely upon nonsense heterosexual body fantasies) so that these depictions are diluted, and allowing them to be taken for what they should be – a bit of knowing fun, rather than what they still are, which are reinforcements for said exclusionary ideals.

I know it’s petty to whine about this, dear RPSers, but the pop-in frame that jumps unbidden into my browser whenever old Mr Pointer saunters across the “share or save this story” link is REALLY ANNOYING.

Can you get Herr Web Developer to add a small (0.5 second delay) or something, so that I never have to see it again?